“One of the ones that went over still had his gun. Don’t suppose there’re spares?”
“There’s a pistol on this one,” Kvelda said, drawing the remaining corpse’s weapon and passing it and two clips across.
Carlos tipped an invisible hat. “Thank you kindly, ma’am.”
Kvelda smirked but said nothing. Day’s boots were in her hands and she offered them over.
“More walls?” Carlos asked.
“No, we’re going in,” Day said.
He gestured at the dark archway set into the concrete block at the end of the walkway. The archway’s twin was in the other direction, at the walkway’s opposite end. Day could perceive the heavy-duty door concealed by the shadows and the submarine-style wheel latch.
“This is suicide,” Carlos said quietly.
“At least we’ve got firepower.”
“Hmmm, for what it’s worth. Vampires won’t blink at anything but silver or sorcery. You know that Day.”
“A few rounds should slow them down. Maybe long enough for me to knife them,” Day said.
“Let’s just hope we can get through unseen,” Kvelda said.
Carlos’s scorn for her was palpable, but he kept mercifully silent.
“Move,” Day said.
He led the way with Carlos at the rear, sweeping around with the M-16. Trying to walk along the edges of the metal mesh flooring, they still made a considerable racket approaching the concrete bunker. Yet no resistance appeared. The loop of metal door was slightly ajar and Day pushed it in, letting his swimming vision rapidly adjust to the low-level light.
The stairs were concrete. Not a person was in sight. For the briefest moment Day exhaled with relief, thinking perhaps Kvelda’s naivety had been like a blessing or maybe even a wish. Then, at the exact moment of his thought, a helmeted head came up the far side of the steps, a handful of other ghouls in tow.
There wasn’t much for it. Day whispered “Ghouls” and stepped forward, laying his rifle across the top of the steel bars overlooking the stairwell. His move gave Kvelda and Carlos room to sweep in and, an instant later, Day unleashed automatic rifle fire on the vampires’ unsuspecting cronies.
There were five of them in all, four of which carried rifles. The bullets tore through them effortlessly, the concrete behind exploding in dense chunks, filling the air with pulverised dust. Before Day’s rifle had emptied, Carlos joined in and then Kvelda belatedly fired away, cutting down the two uninjured ghouls who tried to turn and run.
In the shocking silence that followed Carlos said, “I’m not sure they’re down for the count.”
“Reload,” Day answered.
He tossed his rifle to Carlos and, putting one hand on the now warm railing, vaulted down into the midst of the leather-and vinyl-covered bodies.
Whatever sort of un-life clung to the monstrous cadavers, Day didn’t need to see them twitching to know the rifle fire hadn’t wrought their complete destruction. He produced his daggers and went to work savaging the bodies – bodies which began to move again even as he fell upon them.
The vampire came while Day was well-engaged in his work. It did nothing more than come through the double metal doors at the bottom of the stairs and see the fur-clad, grime-splattered human in his frenzy amid the ghoulish cadavers. Then the creature was seized by its own fury. In that state, it didn’t notice nor try and discern movement on the upper levels. It just bared fangs and claws and rushed its prey, confident as most its kind was in the immediacy of a kill.
It came in fast while Day was still slashing wildly. Its clawing blow caught him across the jaw and he flew back into the unyielding concrete of the stairs, ichor and grey dust staining his jacket. When the vampire pounced it tried to lock eyes, but Day wasn’t having any of it – he snapped his eyes shut and rolled sideways, one blade twisting in a scything motion that took the vamp across the bare shoulder.
The hideous thing gave a frightening howl. Although denied sight, Day had a good sense of where the vampire was and he dropped down the stairs, rolling on his knees over silenced ghoul carcasses while the whip-thin vampire turned on the spot, long hair matted by the centuries into grimy ropes.
Carlos and Kvelda opened up with their reloaded weapons. As Carlos had said, the hellish force of the rifles wasn’t able to score a mortal wound on the vampire. Worse yet, the agile creature was far more resilient than the ghouls. Nevertheless, the majority of sixty rounds tearing through it left the vampire in such a state that it couldn’t immediately recover. While it bled, almost torn in two and with one leg hanging by a skewer of barely-oozing tissue, Day hurtled up the stairs with his retina contracted to pinpricks despite the reign of gloom within the well. In three short movements he ended the creature’s life. A dozen more wounds made sure the thing was barely recognisable.
“Save your strength, Day,” Carlos said from above.
He threw Day’s ghoul rifle away and moved down among the corpses, looting another weapon and quickly rifling the bodies for ammunition.
Day exhaled with a shudder and nodded, bending wearily to strip a rifle for himself free of the mess. Behind him, the double doors still yawned open. Kvelda and Carlos watched the gap warily as they descended.
Moving through the lightly rusted doorway revealed yet more stairs going down. Brass shells tinkled and crunched underfoot as they moved to peer forwards. Faint electric light, presumably for the ghouls’ benefit, lit the way in intermittent patches.
“They must’ve heard that,” Kvelda said.
“Hard to explain that sort of ruckus away,” Carlos agreed.
“Means we have to move fast,” said Day.
He went down the stairs two at a time, leaving Carlos and Kvelda to follow. The stairwell was more confined than the previous descent and it spiralled down past what Day imagined to be the distance to the ground. The feeling of going into the bowels of the earth fell over them all. When the bottom finally came, it was in the form of a much disused-looking space with a dusty concrete floor and another set of double metal doors. There was a chain across the doors and at the end of the concrete steps, blank corridors led off in two directions.
Day realised he had been right to think a network of tunnels ran between the fields, hidden from the sun, but he knew better than to gloat. The reality wasn’t so satisfying. It felt like any noise might betray them. Yet what chance they had of using silence to their advantage after such a tempest of gunfire was anyone’s guess. Nevertheless, between the three of them, they fell into silence as easily as if it were part of the plan.
Day looked from the chained doorway to Carlos and raised an eyebrow, but the swarthy older man only wiped sweat the colour of crude oil from his forehead and moustache and glanced off in the direction of the closest corridor. Kvelda stayed Day’s arm with one cool hand and she unwittingly inched the way Carlos was staring.
“Try that way then,” Day said, barely audible.
He followed them, lifting the thick nose of his weapon to point down the side of where they were walking. The corridor’s dim lights were placed at regular intervals, yet some were broken or dead. Imperceptible to the others, Day felt the deep thrum of electricity running through cables set in the walls and an even more distant bass rumble, that of an enormous generator somewhere at work. It was hard not to wonder at the source of the vampires’ power, yet such musings had low priority among the other orders of the day.
He presumed it was light outside by now. He reasoned the ghouls would be even more plentiful as soon as the sun was up. The vamps had thrown wide the doors in the night and scoured the hex close to clean. That’s what Day expected lay behind their strategy. Like rats scurrying deep in the heart of some vast machine, Day felt himself and his companions were still in with a chance to throw the vampires’ plans off-course, even though the likelihood of their survival seemed to dwindle with every step they took.
Carlos led the group to the edge of more stairs taking them lower, but on the same heading. The sense o
f energy at work grew and, just as the space in front opened up before them into a rank of elevator doors, Day discerned the movements of the ghoul sentries and barked a warning.
Their guns came up at about the same time. Carlos was the only one to clear the corner, lifting his weapon and trying to squash his natural momentum back in the direction of cover. Kvelda was forced sideways by his act and, with Day’s hand on her upper arm, the slim-built girl was wrenched to safety just as the crossfire erupted, filling the antechamber with deadly bullets and bright flashes.
Carlos swept his rifle fire across the two ghouls, bullets crashing through them, while the guards fired back haphazardly. Above the sudden thunder, Carlos gave a yell that was half-scream, half-instruction, and he went down on one knee as if trying to present a smaller target.
Pressing Kvelda to the wall and only inadvertently covering her with his own body, Day used the concrete corner as a shield while lifting the M-16 to his shoulder and methodically gunning the two ghouls to pieces. His magazine didn’t quite empty, smoke curling from the end of the barrel, as the heavily-perforated sentries slumped against the doors they’d been protecting.
Almost instantly, one of these pale green-coloured elevators opened, the half-alive ghoul carcass falling backwards into it. Day lifted his gun again and Carlos, bleeding from the arm and shoulder, staggered backwards away from view. A group of half-a-dozen ghouls inside the elevator likewise pressed themselves against the walls of the car for protection.
It couldn’t help them all. Day squeezed off the last few shots into one unhelmeted ghoul standing directly in the doorway. His head exploded into pieces that spattered his companions like from a rotting melon, and when he fell to the bottom of the car, he didn’t look likely to move again.
Carlos wheezed, “Head shots must kill them.”
Day nodded, already jacking his empty clip and fumbling for another. He looked down and across, eyes flaring in alarm at the profusion of redness coming from Carlos’s arm.
Kvelda wriggled free. “You’re hit?”
“It’s not play-acting,” Carlos said, his eyes shut almost as tight as his clamped fingers over the gushing wound.
“Let me look at it,” Day said.
He crouched, a single glance to Kvelda making it plain she’d be needed to provide cover. The girl moved into position, her rifle levelled at the metal doorway six metres distant. Day crouched and peeled his friend’s fingers back. Immediately the two holes and the flayed meat near his shoulder started running freely.
“Jesus,” Carlos grunted.
“Hold it again,” Day said. He threw off his saturated jacket and then tore his shirt free as well. Twisting a section of it into a strip, he bound Carlos’s shoulder as tight as he was able.
“That hurts too,” Carlos hissed.
“Beats dying,” Day said.
Briefly their eyes locked. Carlos looked away, sweat running down his face like he was in a shower.
A burst of gunfire and falling shells drew their attention back to Kvelda. Day stood and hefted his gun, standing back a pace as she fired twice more and then withdrew. Return fire exploded noisily around them, the corner’s edge and the wall behind them both erupting in dust and disorder. Some of the bullets pinged away down the corridor.
At the next pause Day moved forward. He’d barely made an appearance before he reined sharply back. More gunfire followed.
“What am I thinking?”
From his belt Day took the grenade Fox had smuggled into the camp. Worrying as much for their safety as the explosive’s chance of working, Day pulled the pin and threw it around the corner.
“You threw it too soon –” Carlos began.
The explosion hardly shook them, so solid were the walls. However several of the ghouls – or parts of them, at least – were evicted from the elevator by the force of the blast. A helmeted head and an upper body writhed in unvoiced agony near the wall across from their position.
“You’re meant to count for three seconds,” Carlos said.
“The old grenades are a bit frisky. At least that’s what my dad used to say,” Kvelda said.
“You got a lot of this sort of ordinance, back where you’re from?” Carlos asked. His voice was slightly shrill, not just with pain.
“We live in an army base. Underground.”
Carlos grunted and Day could only nod. One eye around the corner told him everything he needed. The elevator car was a blackened shell, the walls swollen outwards as if from corruption. There were three more metal doors and, adjacent to them across the far side of the foyer, a chipped red metal door.
“Stairs up?”
“No stairs,” Carlos said weakly. “I couldn’t make it.”
“Gonna have to,” Day said.
He wrapped his arm across Carlos’s broad back and wrenched the faltering man upright. With Kvelda reloaded, they crossed the short distance and opened the door and found what they had expected – more concrete stairs.
They struggled upwards. The noises seemed to echo forever and for Day, whose heightened senses alerted him to every pinprick, the dopplering of sounds soon bordered on the ridiculous. The stairwell was an echo chamber, a white noise generator – he was effectively deaf exactly because his ears had become too precise.
It took Kvelda to tell him the vamps were coming. The next thing Day knew, the shadows were leaping like giant moths around the flickering candlelight of Kvelda’s rifle.
As brass jackets tumbled down the stairs, first one and then a second vampire crumpled. Day knew the monsters weren’t likely to be felled by a few measly gunshots. He left Carlos leaning against the concrete wall, a smear of darkening blood instantly marking the wall like a blank page. A moment later Day had two handguns out and was blazing away.
A third vamp collapsed. Day poured bullets into one of the ones rising from mock-death. Even more of the creatures descended on them and, when the pistols were exhausted, Day threw them down and lifted his assault rifle from its strap down near his waist. Kvelda fell back several paces and, wounded as he was, Carlos emptied one rifle and then another, too disabled to reload them once the bullets were gone.
At first the trio’s resistance seemed enough. Six of the bloodthirsty brood were down, twitching as their shattered bodies sought regeneration and the renewal of their strength. But several more of the injured attackers rose again, not giving Day the time to bring his silver blades into play and turn the tide.
Day’s rifle clacked empty and then one of the vampires, ichor oozing from its riddled frame, long dusty hair plastered to its clammy skin, flew straight for him. They struggled with the rifle sideways for a moment and then the creature used brute force to snap the stock. Suddenly the gun was gone. Day got one knife free. He had the sensation of more of the vampire’s ilk coming around him – and then a backhanded blow from his attacker snapped Day’s neck back near to breaking.
He fell and tumbled down the stairs, two of the killers following. As the world kaleidoscoped in shades of grey, he caught sight of Kvelda standing immobile on the stairs, drowning in the fetid pools of one monster’s eyes. Another was crouched over a tangled Carlos. The vampiress ignored the four gunshots emptied point blank into her midriff, snatching and throwing away Carlos’s sidearm an instant later. Then Day’s fight for life resumed.
The silver blade scythed through the air, catching the closest one across the neck. It fell down hissing, either from its mouth or from the wound. Quickly enough another vampire sprang into its place.
“Silence them forever!” one of the creatures squealed over the noise of the others.
“No,” came the deadly under-pitched reply of another vampiress right by Day’s ear.
“Give them the very thing they fear most.”
The things seemed to bay like wolves. Day’s resolve very nearly deserted him right there. His dagger-holding hand was caught in a razor-sharp hold and the weapon prised from his grasp.
“Silver,” a nearby voice whispered
.
Day gritted his teeth and forced a reply, groaning only, “That’s right, curse you.”
The vampire pulled Day’s second knife and held the blade across Day’s throat. He froze instantly, almost able to taste the eerie and deadly game the awful thing played, daring to use the weapon it feared most.
“Do it,” Day forced himself to say.
“They have spirit,” an ancient yet womanly voice said.
“They do,” his assailant croaked.
The vampires cackled among themselves, as pleased as any meeting of killers could be. The knife vanished from Day’s throat and he heard it breaking somewhere close by in the semi-darkness. Just as quickly, Day was forced forward, his face rammed into one concrete step. It nearly defeated him, but not quite. He clung to a lazy sort of consciousness the vampires either couldn’t discern from the real thing or didn’t care to. All but armless and legless, he felt himself push-pulled down the stairs.
They fetched ghouls, using small transmitters normally clipped away under the outer layers of their clothes. Soon enough the task of transporting him fell to half-a-dozen of the vampires’ skeletal servants, who it seemed to Day looked wide-eyed at the devastated corpses of their comrades as they returned to the elevator room.
In his stupor Day still sought signs of Kvelda and Carlos. The vampires had them too, neither moving as they were conveyed from the stairwell by a mixed escort of vamps and ghouls. Day closed his eyes, somehow alert to his uselessness yet still unable to move. Pain swathed his whole body and, if not for the first time, it at least felt like the first time he had really understood what it meant to wish for death rather than suffer any further. He couldn’t conceal from himself the complete desertion of any remaining instinct for survival.
The pain eventually grew too much. In between bouts of blackness and lucidity, Day was moved further, deeper into the vampires’ hidden realm. When the next real glimpses of consciousness came, Day fathomed he was chained to an irregular rock wall along with many others.
The light levels were so low that even Day was almost blind. Yet far away down the enormous natural tunnel there was an intermittent light source and, by its occasional flashes, Day took stock of his surroundings.
Endless Night Page 25